A cardboard contraption that sells for less than $20 has helped save the life of a baby who was so sick that doctors told her parents to take her home to die. The official Google Cardboard looks like a set of big square goggles. Put your iPhone inside and with the right app, you can see images in three-dimensional virtual reality.

The infant’s name is Teagan Lexcan was born in August with an unusual heart and lung defect that doctors have never seen before. She has only one lung and almost all of the left half of her heart is missing. The doctors in Minnesota told the parents, Cassidy and Chad Lexcan, that there was nothing could do. After searching for other options to save their child’s life, they found out that a friend of a friend of a friend was a nurse in a cardiac intensive care unit in Boston. They made contact and doctors asked them to send images of Teegan’s heart taken at the hospital in Minnesota. Two weeks later, the doctors did not reply to the pictures and Teegan’s parents knew they had to try something else because time was running out.
Chad’s sister found an article called “The 20 Most Innovative Pediatric Surgeons Alive Today.” One of them was Dr. Redmond Burke, the chief of cardiovascular surgery at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. Chad’s sister contacted him and heard back immediately and was asked by a nurse to send images of Teegan’s heart. Like the doctors in Minnesota, the doctors in Miami had never seen a child who was missing a lung and half a heart. No one had a definite plan and were short with ideas on what they could do. Burke asked Dr. Juan Carlos Muniz, a pediatric cardiologist who specializes in imaging, to make a 3D model of Teegan’s heart. But the 3D printer was broken. Later, Muniz got the idea from Dr. David Ezon at University of Pittsburgh to use a Google Cardboard device. Using an app called Sketchfab, that collaborates with the goggles, he downloaded images of Teegan’s heart onto his iPhone and showed them to Burke. They were slightly similar to 3D images on a computer but with the goggles, it was possible to move around and see the heart at different angles. When Burke looked through the Google Cardboard, he visualized what he could do to fix her heart. The surgery took place on December 10 when Teegan was 4 months old. The Google Cardboard made the doctors realize that her heart only has one right ventricle when normal hearts have two, one on each side. The surgery was a success and her heart was exactly the same image as it was supposed to.